Success Doesn’t Come From What You Do Occasionally
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“The first time you’re in the ring with an opponent, your body feels like it’s moving by itself. But once I’ve learned a fighter’s strengths and weaknesses, my focus sharpens. If I’m feeling tired or distracted, if my mind is elsewhere, that’s when they’ll hit.”
I was sitting on the couch with her at home after another workout. She’d just been to see our boxing instructor again this morning, and she was still glowing over the compliment he paid her skills yesterday: “You have a natural talent for this, but most fighters only last two fights before getting cut loose from the gym because of their lack of discipline.”
“Yeah?” I said.
She nodded, and then looked into the kitchen as though someone had just entered behind us. We both heard it at the same time: a loud crash. Then another crash, and then another…
“Damn,” I swore, scrambling off the couch and running towards the kitchen. There was nothing there—just the mess we already knew about. The cupboard doors were open, and bottles smashed across the floor. My laptop case was missing, along with several other items. It all happened so fast. Whoever did it didn’t even bother to close the door behind them?
It took me less than five seconds to reach my phone by the bedside table, call 911 and tell them what happened while they got an ambulance out here right away. A police car arrived twenty minutes later.
They went straight upstairs without asking questions, probably because my mom couldn’t answer any of their basic queries about how she felt, and why the house was such a mess. When they told her not to worry, that everything would be taken care of and left to her for now, she nodded but looked like she wanted more reassurance.
And I couldn’t give it to her, because I’d seen too many times how quickly someone could get addicted to the rush of power that comes from stealing another person’s belongings.
There are no winners in a fight. But sometimes, some people don’t know they’re in one until too late.
***
“The first time you’re in the ring with an opponent, your body feels like it’s moving by itself,” she said, smiling at me as though reading my mind. “But once I’ve learned a fighter’s strengths and weaknesses, my focus sharpens. If I’m feeling tired or distracted, if my mind is elsewhere, that’s when they’ll hit.”
This was something else we were working on today, but now wasn’t really the time. We’d just gotten back from a visit to the boxing gym, which was closed for the night since the owner was out of town.
I was sitting beside her at home, trying to help her make sense of our day’s lesson plan, but the words wouldn’t come. I kept seeing her face contort under the blows of that first-time boxer as I stood on the sidelines…
“So…” I said, looking up suddenly to catch her attention.
“Yes?”
“What happens when you lose that focus? Or when someone gets lucky and hits you harder than you expected?”
She shrugged. “I don’t feel pain like normal people do. I can take a punch well enough. But it isn’t like a human punch is going to kill me—not unless I get hit square in the head.”
“And then it might?”
“Well… yes. But I think my ability to regenerate will save me from serious injury. At least in the short term.”
“You haven’t been injured yet?”
She looked down at her hands, flexing and unflexing them. “Not seriously,” she admitted.
“Why not?”
“Because of who I am. It takes a lot more than most people to hurt me.”
“So, let me ask you this: what makes you vulnerable?”
She paused before answering. Her fingers stopped their constant movement on each other and her eyes dropped to look at mine.
“When I get angry or upset, the anger becomes part of my magic.”
“Okay, but—”
“And when I use too much of that magic, there’s a limit to how much I can heal myself. So far, I’ve never broken anything permanently or caused anyone permanent damage, but if I’m pushed too hard, that might change.”
We sat staring at each other, neither of us able to form the words to say more. It was all coming together in a way I’d never considered, and the truth was sinking into my brain like a lead weight. She wasn’t just a human being who happened to have a gift that came with certain risks; she was a powerful force in her own right.
A woman who could do things no one should ever need to do… like steal a man’s life force. And it frightened me to think that if I ever lost control, I might someday become her enemy.
I turned my gaze to the window and let the darkness of the night surround me, feeling like I was drowning in an unfamiliar sea. I’d always had the illusion that if I worked hard enough if I trained long enough and learned the secrets of my own powers, I’d be safe.
That whatever I faced would turn out to be something that could only happen once, and that I would be strong enough to overcome it.
Now, with the threat of losing my mind, the very thought of facing the dark places inside myself made me tremble. And I still hadn’t talked to my mother about the dream or what I was dealing with personally.
If she knew what I was struggling against…
It took another minute or so before I found the courage to meet her eyes again. She looked down and away while I gathered myself, wondering if we’d both ruined everything between us, but finally, I spoke.
“What happens when someone breaks your heart? How does a person survive a tragedy like that?”
She sighed and ran her hand through her hair. Then her shoulders slumped as she leaned forward on the table and rested her elbows on her knees. “Let me tell you my story,” she said.
“What happened to your parents?” I asked gently.
“My mom died from a sudden illness when I was fifteen. My father went off the deep end after she passed, and he ended up killing himself two years later. He left behind nothing except a note telling everyone to forget him. I guess he didn’t want anything tying him to reality.”
I wanted to comfort her. To hold her and say it was going to be okay, even if I couldn’t believe those words. Instead, all I did was sit quietly with her while she told her tale.
The thing she’d never shared with anyone was that she had also lost someone who meant something special to her during childhood. In a way, this was the story of her life; she’d already told me about her father, and now I understood why it seemed like she could read the emotions of other people.
Because she could. The only difference was that I couldn’t see past the surface layers to figure out what she needed. Not really.
I reached over and wrapped my fingers around hers, and she squeezed back.
“But that’s not the part of my life you’re asking about?” I prompted.
She nodded. “That was when I became what I am. When I was seventeen, I was living in Seattle, working at a coffee shop near campus. One day, I came home and found my dad dead on my porch.”
“Did you know him well?” I asked.
“No. He had come in a couple times, looking for help with his job search. I guess he’d been laid off from work.”
“Why was he there?”
She hesitated. “He was probably hoping to find a connection to me. Someone to blame for her death,” she said, referring to herself.
“Oh…” I said, letting go of her hand. This must be difficult for her to talk about, but the silence between us was awkward enough that it felt almost wrong to speak. I waited, knowing eventually she would have to continue.
Finally, she looked back at me and continued her tale, “The thing is, when I saw him there, I started to feel strange. Like something was happening. And then suddenly, I could hear voices coming from everywhere, all talking at once.”
“What kind of voices?”
“Voices from my head, as if they were all speaking and trying to drown each other out.” She gave me a small smile. “I’ve got a lot of things on my mind, you see?”
“And then you killed your father?”
Her mouth twisted into a faint frown. “There’s no way to kill a person in a dream. If you tried, you just woke yourself up.”
“What happened next?”
“Well, that’s the funny part,” she said, tilting her head and smiling again. “For some reason, I wasn’t afraid of the dead man on my doorstep. It was just like before; I heard him calling out to me, begging for help.
But instead of turning on him, I pulled out some of the money I used to pay my rent and handed him the bills. He took them and disappeared into the night. Then I sat down on my couch and cried for my mom.”
She let go of my hands and wiped the tears from under her eyes with her fingertips, and when she met my gaze again, I felt my insides twist into knots because I knew we weren’t done. Not by far. “You don’t understand,” she said.
“I still cry every time I remember that moment, even though it happened more than ten years ago. Because it was real. The whole thing was too real. It was like I hadn’t even imagined it until it happened, and then all of a sudden I remembered it as if it had been yesterday. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can feel the pain, smell the air, hear the rain and birds outside.”
I thought about the night she’d woken me up by throwing water over my face. How she told me that sometimes when people are hurt or threatened, their subconscious takes over and tries to protect them. That it was her gift, that she could sense the truth of things.
Now, sitting here, watching her tremble in front of me, she was so much braver than I’d ever realized. All because she’d chosen to share the worst moments of her life with me. I was grateful, but it made me want to run away screaming.
Or to take a knife and cut myself open to try and purge the memory from my brain. But she couldn’t be saved from this, not yet. We both needed to get past these moments first.
“It was a terrible feeling, to lose him like that,” she finally said. “Like I’d abandoned him when he was crying out for help.”
“Do you think you’ll ever forget about it?” I asked, and although my words sounded gentle, in reality, I was terrified to learn that she couldn’t block the memories out of her head. What then? Would this become her life forever? A dark void where nightmares never ceased, and she lived in constant fear?
I hated that this woman—who’d suffered through so many horrors already—could also live with something so horrible, that the mere remembrance of such a traumatic experience could bring her to tears.
“Sometimes,” she whispered, “when I’m alone. In the quiet hours of the night, when everything goes black, and only my heartbeat echoes inside my head, I imagine how he died.”
The muscles in my legs tensed. I reached out and gently placed my fingers on her arm, and for a few seconds, we watched one another without saying anything. My breath rasped loudly against my lips, but neither of us moved to speak.
Then I leaned forward and kissed the top of her hand. It was cool and dry and soft-feeling, like velvet. When our noses bumped together, I tasted the faint saltiness of tears that lingered on her skin.
“When did you move here?” I asked then.
She shook her head, and a single tear rolled down the side of her cheek. She brushed it off absently. “Last month.”
So I’d missed my chance to meet her before then. Which meant I must have been gone for most of the summer. But I didn’t bother asking her what she’d been doing while I was gone. It would only make things awkward.
Then she surprised me by taking my right hand and pressing it to her cheek. It made me flinch at first, but the gesture brought a flood of heat to my cheeks that felt nice. And I wanted to do more than kiss her now. Wanted to hold her tight and tell her we were going to get through this. We were stronger than any bad dream.
But when I pulled away, she was shaking all over, her face pales in the moonlight. Her shoulders trembled, and her body quaked like an earthquake. I grabbed her wrist, wanting to pull her closer, but she jerked away and buried her head in my shoulder, sobbing softly.
After a few minutes of this, I got up to walk back toward my house. It wasn’t far, but I wanted to put some distance between us and try to figure out how to make her stop crying. To make sure she was okay. Maybe the fresh air could help clear her mind and wash away whatever nightmare had just ripped apart her peace.
But as we approached my house, I noticed something strange: I heard the sound of a baby crying—loudly. From deep inside the woods behind the barns. The same direction we’d come from. So loud I could feel the vibration in my feet, almost as if it was coming through the earth itself.
“What is that?” I asked.
Molly’s gaze darted around the field in front of me, searching for a way out. “I can hear it,” she breathed. “It sounds like—”
“An infant,” I finished for her.
“Yes, that’s exactly it!”
We both looked at each other, and then we broke into a sprint until we reached the edge of the woods, and I stopped abruptly on the dirt path and stared down the hillside, trying to see if anyone else had heard the cry. But no one came running toward us or called out from down there, so I turned to look at Molly and saw her staring at me with a worried expression on her face.
“You’re certain it came from somewhere in here?” I asked.
“I think so,” she said quietly, “but what’s it mean? Is someone hurt? Or is that a ghost? Do you think that was an old woman’s spirit calling out for help?”
I glanced at the forest again. “Maybe it’s not even real.”
I tried to convince myself of that—tried to believe I might be going crazy for hearing cries in the darkness—but I knew I couldn’t lie to myself, because nothing was really wrong. No ghosts. No monsters. Just a couple of girls, who’d seen too much horror in their lifetimes, and were having trouble believing everything they thought was a figment of their imagination actually wasn’t.
That was probably why they weren’t answering my questions about what happened to them during the day. They simply didn’t want to talk about it. Because if I found out the truth, I wouldn’t be able to turn my back on it anymore. I’d know for sure this wasn’t fantasy and unbelievable, but something far worse than any of us could comprehend.
A chill washed over me, and I shivered hard enough to shake my body until goose bumps popped up on my arms and across my forehead. But then I forced myself to smile at Molly. “Come on, let’s go back home.”
She nodded but still seemed shaken. So I took her arm, and we started walking slowly down the hill, our footsteps ringing on the dry grass. We paused briefly to glance in all directions, and I wondered what else we might find if we searched deeper into the woods. If we ventured farther in where we couldn’t see.
I hoped we wouldn’t find anything else, because I didn’t want to face those kinds of terrors alone, and the idea of being trapped in the dark with a monster scared me more than I’d ever admit. But I’d never let fear rule my life or keep me from living.
I’d learned that lesson long ago. As long as I remembered my friends, my family, and my dreams, I knew I could face whatever came next without falling off a cliff of panic and despair.
The only thing I couldn’t control was the past. And maybe that was the hardest part of all.
***
Dawn arrived bright and early that morning, filling the sky with pink-and-orange light as we drove toward my house.
I glanced nervously out my window every once in a while, expecting to see headlights coming toward us at any moment, ready to smash into us before I could escape. I’d told Molly it was safe, but I knew better by now. When things went south, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do. Not against monsters. I’d already made that mistake.
But no lights came, and the road remained empty. After twenty minutes, I finally relaxed and started paying attention to other details. To the landscape outside of my windshield, which I hadn’t been able to take much notice of the night before.
The trees lining the roads were tall and thick, and the grass along either side of the lane was so low to the ground that it felt like it was waving at us, as though it welcomed us back into its territory after our long absence.
It was peaceful beyond words, but also somehow ominous. Like there were spirits hiding in the shadows between the trees. Waiting to grab us with invisible fingers and pull us in deeper with silent voices.
I wished for the thousandth time that I’d brought my bow or my gun. That I wasn’t limited to fighting with nothing but a dagger and a handful of salt.
But I couldn’t complain. The world hadn’t ended overnight; not yet, anyway. Maybe when we got closer to town, I’d feel differently.
Molly sighed and twisted around to face me. She rested her head against the back of the seat and looked pale and tired. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to fall asleep without nightmares chasing you away?”
“You should write a book,” I told her. “It seems like there are enough people who’d buy your story.”
She frowned and rubbed at her eyes, but didn’t say anything. I kept driving, knowing that eventually, we would come to a place where we’d both stop talking for a little while.
Because there were a lot of questions I wanted to ask her that I hadn’t had a chance to ask since last night, and now wasn’t the best time to start in on all of them. So instead I turned on an old movie and waited for her to wake up from sleep deprivation and answer me. Or maybe just nod off first. Either way would be fine.
As we pulled up to my house, I glanced behind me at the forest one final time. Then I climbed out, grabbed my backpack, and held it open for Molly. “I need a shower,” she said as she passed me to step out of the car onto the gravel driveway.
So I followed suit, leaving my backpack beside the passenger door and heading down the steps to cross through the backyard. The sun shone brightly above the trees, making everything glow a vibrant shade of red and gold. A cool breeze blew in from the mountains, bringing with it the scent of pine, and I inhaled deeply to fill my lungs with the refreshing air.
Once inside the house, I closed and locked the front door before hurrying upstairs to put on my shoes and get dressed. The bathroom was clean and quiet as I showered, washing away the grime of the mountain and the sticky residue from the mud.
When I emerged, I saw that Molly had already cleaned up and dressed in her favorite purple yoga pants and an oversized sweater. Her hair was combed back again, and she stood waiting for me by the staircase leading downstairs, her arms crossed over the tops of the pockets. “Ready?”
“Almost,” I said as I tied the laces on my hiking boots. There was a pile of dirty clothes under the kitchen sink for laundry, so I threw mine in with everyone else’s. I’d wash my own when I came back tonight.
I glanced at Molly one last time as I headed downstairs. If we survived today, we might never have a chance like this again. We needed to know more about each other if we were going to be working together. So far we hadn’t talked much. Not even after the fight with the demon.
Maybe because we had nothing to talk about, or maybe because we weren’t comfortable with one another—not yet, anyway. But there was a good possibility that today would change all of that. So I stopped myself before taking one step too many, turned around, and took her hand gently in my palm.
There was a spark of surprise in her eyes. And then, slowly, they softened into recognition.
Her hand tightened against mine for just a second, and then we both walked down the stairs side-by-side.
The End